On 29/10/2013 5:37 AM, Gerhard Adam wrote:
As for Google and many of these other companies, they are certainly adequate for the markets they are in, what what technology are they exploiting? Are they demonstrably cheaper to run? Do they require less staff? In short, what is the basis for even making the comparison?
I only have anecdotal evidence of this but I heard that Google have a team of about 100 software support engineers supporting geographical areas spanning entire continents and hundreds of thousands of servers. They have very sophisticated automation and their data centres have all kinds of smarts such as coloured lights to indicate hardware failures in quadrants so engineers can quickly detect where to swap out broken hardware. It's a different world. The scale of their data centres is simply astonishing. We are relying more and more on our mobile devices to do everything from booking a table at a restaurant to navigating our car journeys.
There's a new data centre being constructed a couple of miles from where I live and it's absolutely huge. There is a big sign outside with an image of an iPhone. Mobile computing has changed the landscape of IT considerably and the hardware and software that runs those servers are very different to what us mainframers are used to. To even suggest that a dozen or so mainframes can handle that kind of scale is nonsense, and I'm getting bored of reading blogs that make such outrageous claims.
Considering the importance of mainframes (z/OS) to the companies we depend on for our everyday lives they are not going away any-time soon. But they certainly won't be snatching market share from the new kids on the block.
Just my opinion. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
